Kate Durbin is a Los Angeles-based writer and artist. Her books of poetry include E! Entertainment, The Ravenous Audience, and ABRA, which won the 2017 international Turn On Literature Prize. Durbin was the Arts Queensland Poet-in-Residence in Brisbane, Australia in 2015. Her art and writing have been featured in the New York Times, Art in America, Artforum, The Believer, BOMB, poets.org, the American Poetry Review, and elsewhere. She has shown her artwork nationally and internationally at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle, The PULSE Art Fair in Miami, MOCA Los Angeles, the SPRING/BREAK Art Show in Los Angeles, peer to space in Berlin, and more.
Kate Durbin will be reading from her newest poetry book, Hoarders (published by Wave Books) with special guest Alex Dimitrov, also reading from new work, in our City Lights LIVE! virtual events series on Thursday, May 6th!
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Where are you writing to us from?
Los Angeles, California. I’m sitting at my writing desk with a bowl of Lucky Charms.
What’s kept you sane during the pandemic?
I recently bought a View-Master from eBay, and I’ve been looking at all these beautiful old reels, of places like Yellowstone in the 60s, and miniatures of old Disney movies like Pinocchio. There’s something comforting about a little 3-D world inside a View-Master. It gives this feeling of a world continuing on, outside the frame, beyond your vision.
What books are you reading right now? Which books do you return to?
Right now I’m reading Carribean Fragoza’s Eat the Mouth That Feeds You, Kate Zambreno’s To Write As If Already Dead, Sam Cohen’s Sarahland, Henry Hoke’s The Groundhog Forever, Women in Concrete Poetry: 1959-1979, Divya Victor’s Curb, and Ted Dodson’s An Orange.
I return to more books than I can list here! I’m a big re-reader. The most recent is Nathalie Sarraute’s Tropisms, which are beautiful, short, strange meditations on everyday objects and spaces. I have been thinking a lot about objects, how mysterious they really are. And their complicated relationships to people. This object-person question is a thread through my books E! Entertainment, Hoarders, and a novel I’m working on now about my childhood.
Which writers, artists, and others influence your work in general, and this book, specifically?
Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons was a big influence for my most recent book, Hoarders. Stein’s book is filled with slippery little objects with a language all their own. In Hoarders, the objects also have a kind of animism, or life to them, and a sense of humor too. For example, there’s a poem filled with surreal Barbies, that are real Barbies that have actually been made and marketed! Walk and Potty Pup Barbie, who comes with a tiny dog with nuggets of fake poop, Claude Monet Water Color Barbie, Tippi Hedren in The Birds Barbie, and many more.
If you opened a bookstore, where would it be located, what would it be called, and what would your bestseller be?
My bookstore would be located inside the Golden Nugget Casino in Las Vegas, somewhere near the shark slide. It would be called McDonald’s Chicken Nuggets, and our bestseller would be Jean Baudrillard’s America.
